Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) System for Wildfire Response

Aeris proposes to develop an Unmanned aircraft systems Traffic Management (UTM) airspace operations capability specifically designed to support Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) wildfire response operations. This wildfire UTM system will ingest continually updating information on environmental/fire conditions, dynamically evolving air traffic demands comprised of both UAS and traditional firefighting aircraft, microscale weather information and then leverage graph analytics machine learning methods to providenbsp;tacticalnbsp;UAM/AAM UTM capability that can providenbsp;dynamic andnbsp;real-timenbsp;aircraft route planning and scheduling recommendations for wildfire response stakeholders.nbsp;nbsp;The innovation proposed here will enable combined situational awareness between operations centers and in-theater assets during an active fire response by dynamically aggregating data pertaining to fire location, ground-based personnel, asset locations, staging sites, vertiports, and aerial traffic of traditional manned and unmanned systems.nbsp;nbsp;This capability will allow for the dynamic scheduling of aircraft and the deconfliction of the airspace as users enter sortie requests in real time, it will accommodate on-demand coordination of aircraft regardless of their performance capabilities (ie, everything from a small camera drone up to a manned heavy airtanker). The focus of the Phase I effort proposed here will be to provide the user of this wildland fire UTM system with a detailed and deconflicted route selection and flight schedule that optimizes efficiency of flight operations and ensures safety.